The history of the Food and Drug Administration is one of the many corporatist climaxes in US history. I explain at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

People praise Sinclair’s book [The Jungle] as the single work that catalyzed the Federal Meat Inspection Act’s quick movement through Congress. But to praise Sinclair’s text is to praise the author’s sensationalized fantasies of a capitalistic system in Chicago that he had never even seen. It’s reasonable to suggest that the intestine-covered floors and puddles of animal blood dreamed up by Sinclair were, in fact, unreal and not simply missed by hundreds of meat inspectors sanctioned by the US government throughout the decade preceding 1906. […]

Large meatpacking companies endorsed the new legislation as a way to cripple the impeding competition of smaller firms and to make sure that taxpayers were forced to pick up the tab for its costly enforcement. In an ironic twist of events, Sinclair openly rejected the legislation for its true, fascistic nature.